Bitcoin, Explained — The Technical Side of Bitcoin

In this episode, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) discuss a recent blog post by Bitcoin Core developer Anthony Towns (@ajtowns), “Putting the B in BTC”, in which he outlines a vision for scaling Bitcoin to facilitate billions of users. As Aaron and Sjors walk through the article, they explain what some of Towns’ proposed solutions are, and which tradeoffs they entail.

Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425

THIS EPISODE’S SPONSORS:

Voltage Cloud

Bitcoin Magazine

In this episode, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) discuss Bitcoin Core 25.0, the latest major release of the Bitcoin Core software. They highlight four of the most notable changes: performance improvements concerning huge transaction loads, further Miniscript integration, a faster wallet re-scan, and the decreased 65-byte transaction limit policy rule.

For further reading on the reasoning behind 65-byte policy rule, also see: https://bitslog.com/2018/06/09/leaf-node-weakness-in-bitcoin-merkle-tree-design/

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) are joined by Braiins co-founder Jan Čapek (@janbraiins), who has been leading the initiative to upgrade pooled mining to the Stratum V2 protocol. Aaron, Sjors and Jan discuss what pooled mining is, how the Stratum protocol helps with that, and in what ways Stratum V2 is an improvement over Stratum V1.

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://btcwip.com

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) explain why the witness discount was included in the Segregated Witness protocol upgrade from 2017, why this discount is 75%, and why this discount still makes sense in today’s world where Inscriptions benefit from it. Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/ Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron (@AaronvanW) and Sjors (@provoost) explain Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBTs), discussing what problems they solve, how they work, and some of the ways they are used. In the last part of the episode, the hosts zoom in on one particular PSBT use case called Dutch Auctions, which Bitcoin Magazine recently used to sell ordinals.

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://btcwip.com/

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss BIP 324, the proposal by Dhruv, Pieter Wuille and Tim Ruffing to add peer-to-peer (P2P) encryption to the Bitcoin protocol. They explain why this is needed, how it would work, and which problems it would, and wouldn’t solve.

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors explain Stamps, a new(?) protocol to upload images onto the Bitcoin blockchain, which end up in the UTXO set. To learn more about some of the concepts mentioned in this episode, also check out episode 15 (Utreexo), episode 61 (OP_RETURN), episode 72 (Inscriptions) and episode 75 (Multisig).

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://btcwip.com/

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors discuss multi-signature (multisig), and the various ways that Bitcoin enables multisig; from bare multisig, to P2SH, SegWit, Taproot, and finally Musig, as well as some potential future solutions.

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors explain pay-to-script-hash (P2SH), which allows bitcoin to be sent to and from the hash of a script. Besides (the current implementation of) P2SH itself, Aaron and Sjors also discuss some alternatives that were proposed around the time that P2SH was adopted in 2012.

For further reading on the history of P2SH, also see “The Battle for P2SH: The Untold History of Bitcoin’s First War“

Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425

In this episode of Bitcoin, Explained, Aaron and Sjors explain OP_VAULT, a proposed op code that would enable an elegant type of vaults through Bitcoin’s scripting language.

For more information, also see:

https://jameso.be/vaults.pdf

https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/c589490f98ba1b0c606d0e2030463f1fde54b786/bip-vaults.mediawiki

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Episode Sponsor: https://voltage.cloud/

Sjors New Book: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Technical-innovations-Sjors-Provoost/dp/9090360425